Whiteboard contributor Balazs Szabo did some digging in seed-db.com, and he came up with this gem: all the Y Combinator startups, taken together, have raked in more than $ 1 billion in funding, as he reports on his blog CEE Startups. Various disclaimers and caveats about the quality data in seed-db apply, of course (see their site), but still.
Another fun fact is this: the Y Combinator companies have amassed more...

Lauritz.com might not be a househould name outside the Nordics, but they're a very interesting business, and obviously an online powerhouse in its markets. Lauritz is a high end auction site, specialized in art and antiques, and it just announced the acquisition of QXL, another online auction site operating in Denmark and Norway.
Lauritz sells luxury items starting from DK 850 (€ 115) - antiques, art, jewellery,...

Interesting interview with Mark Heesen, the head of the NVCA (National Venture Capital Association) at PandoDaily. He says VC's have worked so hard to drive down the cost of starting an internet company - and have been so successful at it, that they've made themselves superfluous. As he puts it: "we worked ourselves out of a job".
The other big change in the last ten years is that in IT, entrepreneurs don’t need v...

Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison just announced on Twitter that Stripe acquired Kickoff, an iOS and Mac team chat and task application that was still in beta. Kickoff was founded by designer Benjamin De Cock and developer Michaël Villar, who will both join the Stripe team in San Francisco, according to a blog post by Benjamin De Cock.
Stripe's first acquisition: kickoffapp.com. The amazing @bdc and @mich...

As 'Moneyball' by Michael Lewis already showed, team managers as well as sports fans are eager for stats and data about teams, players and leagues. And we've only scratched the surface of what's possible: a recent announcement by SAP made that all the more clearer.
Sports <3 big data
Big data and sports were already a thing before SAP took an interest. In my previous life as a magazine writer, I already wrote an...